Marketing research provides organizations with data to help them better understand their customers’ needs, wants, and behaviors. The marketing research process is one that occurs over time—it’s not something you can do quickly or on the fly. Instead, it requires thoughtful planning and perseverance in order to get the information you need to make decisions that will help your organization succeed. Here’s what it looks like, step by step.
Steps in Planning
In order to perform any type of market research, you first need to plan it in great detail. Begin by asking yourself these questions:
– What is the goal of the marketing research?
– Who is your target audience?
– What stage of the product life cycle is your product in?
You’ll also need to:
– Define the problem. What are the marketing research problems you want to solve? These could include marketing campaign effectiveness or advertising’s impact on sales for example.
– Gather information about your target market. Who will be buying your product or service? If you’re a social media app, are you targeting teens? Businessmen? We use various methods to gather information about our target market such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews.
– Create a survey that collects data from prospective customers (market research examples). What do you want them to answer about their preferences?
Steps in Conducting
The marketing research process starts with an idea. Next, you need to find out whether your idea is viable by conducting market research.
There are five steps to conducting a marketing research: plan, collect data, analyze the data, interpret the data and use it to make decisions.
A market research can be done in many ways. You can conduct a marketing research either through surveys or interviews. If you conduct surveys then you will have to develop survey questions with clear responses that can be analyzed statistically.
If you conduct interviews then you will need to set up a structured interview protocol that collects information about the people interviewed for the market research as well as their perceptions about various products or services in comparison to other brands.
Steps in Analyzing
The results of the marketing research must be analyzed to interpret any findings. The steps in the process of analyzing a marketing research are as follows but not limited to:
1. Summarize the findings to identify key points.
2. Qualitatively analyze the data by grouping responses into categories that share similar themes or thoughts.
3. Quantitatively analyze the data by calculating percentages for each response category to determine which groups have stronger feelings about a topic or idea than others do.
Steps in Interpreting
The first step to interpreting your research is to look at the results of the survey. There should be a variety of different ways to interpret the data including pie charts and bar graphs.
The colors of these graphs can also tell you a lot about what people thought about your marketing campaign or product, for example green means that people liked it while yellow indicates an indifference.
The next steps are to measure how favorable the feedback was overall by looking at the average ratings for each question on a scale from 1-5.
You should then look at how many people rated each question and try to determine if there were any patterns in their answers as well as note how many people answered each question with either 1 or 5 stars on a scale of 1-5.
How to use the findings
Marketing research is the process of gathering and analyzing data to help a company evaluate its current marketing strategy. It’s most effective when it’s used in tandem with the other steps of the marketing mix process—namely, product development and pricing. Market research examples can be found in many different industries including retail, tech, cosmetics, food service, and more.
After completing a marketing research you may find the need to alter your original plan or conduct additional research in order to get a better understanding of what is happening in your market.
